The Years by Virginia Woolf

His hand began its voyage up and down her neck,...

Above the roofs was one of those red nd fitful London sunsets that make window after window burn gold.

...she could see flamingo-coloured curls of cloud lying on a pale-blue sky.

..;the hair which had been red was now white, save that there were queer yellow patches in it, as if some locks had been dipped in the yolk of an egg.

The trees were trembling their shadows over the pavement.

...and her face cracked like an old glazed pot.

There were reflections in the water, branches and a pale strip of sky.

It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow.

The chair, standing empty, as if waiting for someone, had a look of ceremony;...

All her limbs seemed to bend and flow in the lilt and curve of the music;...

How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre:...

It was odd how different the same person seemed to two different people, she thought.

...the clouds kept their freedom, wandering fitfully, staining windows gold, daubing them black, passed and vanished,...

...the ceiling trembled with a watery pattern of fluctuating light.

Slowly the world emerged from darkness. The sea became like the skin of an innumerable scaled fish, glittering gold.

In four months questions accumulated. Out they came drop by drop.

...and then, to her delight, the liquid call of an owl going from tree to tree looping them with silver.

Wine was good--it broke down barriers.

Fragments of other people's talk reached them in broken sentences.

There was a tang of earth in the air;...